Zehra Duman

Zehra Duman (born 1993) is an Australian woman who traveled to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant territory, where she married a jihadi fighter.

Duman was a friend of Tara Nettleton, who traveled from Australia with her five children to join her jihadi husband Khaled Sharrouf in ISIL territory in 2014. Duman's online recruiting activities have been the subject of scholarly attention. Her Australian citizenship was revoked in 2019,

Early life Duman was born in Melbourne, a third-generation Australian of Turkish descent. She described her childhood as difficult and said her parents were divorced and she suffered from depression in her early teens. She did not grow up as a practicing Muslim, but became one by her later teens.

At age fourteen, Duman briefly dated a local boy named Mahmoud Abdullatif. After that relationship ended, she had no contact with him for years. In 2014, Abdullatif reached out to Duman again over social media and told her he would give her "a beautiful life." By this time, he was 23 years old and in ISIL territory, and Duman went there to marry him. She later said her parents were "shocked, as I never have been public with my jihadi views. But also heartbroken" by her decision.

Duman has been described as an active recruiter of volunteers, a jihad supporter who claimed to want to personally undertake a suicide mission or engage in combat. She advised women who wanted to join ISIL to either travel there with a mahram such as their father or brother, or to commit attacks at home if they were unable to travel to the ISIL caliphate. After her husband's death, Duman said on her Ask.fm account that "alhamdulillah I have my sisters whom I love for the sake of Allah always at my house" and so she wasn't lonely. She told an SBS News reporter she was "actually so happy" for Abdullatif when he was killed because that was what he had wanted, and that she wanted martyrdom for herself as well.

After the defeat of ISIL In February 2019, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation obtained a video of Duman in the Al-Hawl refugee camp in northeast Syria. She said she had been living with Tara Nettleton when Nettleton died in 2015, and that Nettleton's three surviving children remained in ISIL-occupied territory and were "fine" the last time she saw them.

On 28 February, Dateline interviewed Duman's mother, who had recently heard from her. Her mother told Dateline that, by 2017, Duman had grown disenchanted with ISIL and wanted to come home to Australia, but could not because of ISIL's intense scrutiny of those living in its territory. She said Duman and her children were being held in poor conditions and that Duman had expressed suicidal thoughts.

The New Daily reported that Duman and other Australian citizens had been taken from the Al Hawl camp in mid 2019. The Australian citizens were hooded, so they would not know where they were. They reported that the other Australians were taken to Iraq, where they met with Australian officials, while Duman was detained in an unknown location. There was speculation that she was removed for her own protection as the most devout followers of the ISIL philosophy in the camp disapproved of signs she had abandoned radicalism. In particular, she had stopped covering her head, and had taken up smoking cigarettes. She was returned to the camp without any explanation.

On 7 October 2019, Duman's Australian citizenship was revoked. In December 2019, the Herald-Sun cited Duman as an example, when it quoted an American official who called on US allies, like Australia, to repatriate their citizens instead of stripping them of citizenship. The official argued that stripping citizens of citizenship can backfire and trigger them to acts of violence.

That same year, Duman escaped from Al-Hawl and was detained when she entered Turkey at the border crossing at Tell Abyad. In September, a Turkish court in Sanliurfa sentenced her to six years and ten months in prison for being a member of an armed terrorist group. She denied having ever played an active role in ISIL and said she simply lived in areas controlled by the group. Two months later, she appeared before a court in Gaziantep and was ordered released from custody, because there was no one else to look after her children.

As of June 2021, Duman was living with her children in an unknown location in Turkey. She appealed the loss of her Australian citizenship and also sought Australian citizenship for her children. In August 2023, her citizenship was restored to her.